The simplicity of setting up a Kinesis trigger for a Lambda function may be deceptive. There are pitfalls that can cause problems we will spot only later, in the production environment. I learned about some of them the hard way, so let’s say I speak from the experience.
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AWS
Headless CMS with Gatsby on AWS for $0.00 per month
Can you have a website with a CMS on AWS and not pay just for its existence? I looked at Amazon Lightsail, headless WordPress, and Webiny CMS but found none of those suitable. So I choose Prismic – a SaaS headless CMS, and Gatsby to create the site. Yes, I needed to make a pipeline to build my website after content changes. But when I did it, I got a website with CMS hosted at no cost.
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AWS
Choosing between SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge
AWS can overwhelm with the number of services. Especially if multiple services seem to do a very similar job. Let’s look at the cloud-native AWS messaging services – the SQS, SNS, Kinesis, and EventBridge. What are the differences and when to use which one?
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AWS
AWS Lambda performance optimization
There are two reasons to optimize AWS Lambda functions performance. First is money – you pay for the Lambda execution duration. The quicker you do the job, the less you pay. The second is latency – the quicker you do the job, the shorter your client waits for the result. It’s a known fact that the decrease of latency improves sales, user engagement, and client satisfaction – so we could argue it’s also the money, in the end.
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AWS
AWS JavaScript SDK v3 – usage, problems, testing
The new version of AWS SDK for JavaScript / TypeScript / Node.js came with a few significant improvements. But does “General Availability” mean “ready for the production”? How to use it? And how to unit test our code using it? Let’s take a look at it.
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AWS
AWS Lambda logging best practices
Logging in AWS Lambda functions is simple. You just print the message, and it’s sent to the CloudWatch Logs. And everything is fine until you get a surprisingly big bill for the CloudWatch usage, or you need to actually debug some live system. Here are my tips for logging in AWS Lambda, based on my experience with real-live, big-scale functions running on production.
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AWS
Three ways to create Amazon Athena tables
Here I show three ways to create Amazon Athena tables. More importantly, I show when to use which one (and when don’t) depending on the case, with comparison and tips, and a sample data flow architecture implementation. Also, I have a short rant over redundant AWS Glue features. All in a single article. Enjoy.
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AWS
Auto-generated website environment parameters
There are multiple articles on how to host a static website or Single Page Application (SPA) on AWS. But they rarely go into the topic of setting up the environment variables for the frontend application.
Let’s look beyond the part where most tutorials end – with the website deployed, how to parametrize it to call correct backend APIs and resources. We will look at the usual deployment process and improve it. In the end, the application will automatically reference the services from its own environment, both when deployed and locally.
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AWS Tools
My AWS toolbox – tools, plugins and applications
Developers, like all specialists, discover and collect their favorite tools over time. Having a good, proven set of tools makes the work easier and more pleasant. We can focus on getting the job done. Sometimes eliminating minor inconveniences or improving a small element of everyday activity makes the greatest impact on the comfort of work.
It’s not always easy to find the best tools. There is a wide choice. More importantly, everyone has different habits and preferences. The best way is to test them yourself and see what suits you.
To help a little bit with that, here I present a collection of my AWS tools. These are applications, plugins, and extensions that I use in my daily work with AWS.
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AWS
Serverless Swagger UI for API Gateway
Amazon API Gateway provides an option to export the API schema as an OpenAPI Specification. With it, we can display our REST API as an interactive website. But we do not get a public URL to that specification file which we could use as a source for an interactive page like Swagger. Instead, we can only get the file from the AWS Console, CLI, or SDK.
This is why we need to do a few additional steps to get our beautiful documentation working. As a result, we will get a fully customizable website, with easy to implement access protection. And, maybe the most important, it will be always up-to-date, with no work required after changes in the API Gateway endpoints.
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